In the 1970s, the complaint was that human life was becoming increasingly medicalised. This book tries to reclaim some of the lost ground. John Archer, Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, lists various ways of viewing grief, but he prefers to view it as a “natural human reaction”. He explores it in different cultures, at different times in history, in art, poetry, literature and the cinema, and this I found refreshing, although he also examines its clinical features. Like most academic psychologists, his main concern is with scientific studies, and large numbers of these are reviewed with scrupulous rigour. Reactions to every conceivable form of death are considered, including those to miscarriages, abortions, still births and cot deaths. Every testable theory is tested.

Psychoanalysis gets pretty short shrift, but attachment theory is more sympathetically dealt with. Essentially, as we all knew anyway, the greater the degree of attachment, the more intense the grief. Archer points out more than once that, in cultures where infant mortality is high, mothers do not form strong attachments to their children and consequently do not grieve their death. Murray Parkes, the British authority on grief, is respectfully and repeatedly cited, as are the Stroebes, whose dual-process model of recovery from loss, involving an oscillation between facing grief and breaking bonds and denial, avoidance and controlled distraction, is extensively discussed and recommended. Archer believes, as do many psychologists, that our preoccupation with the necessity for grief work, which, he says, is sometimes confused with rumination, has deflected us from considering the value of indulging in comforting fantasies, becoming immersed in new interests and even denial.

Although the word evolution is placed prominently in the book's subtitle, the topic of evolution surfaces only in Chapter 9, and even then, not very convincingly. The value of evolutionary theory is that it generates testable hypotheses. These include: that we are programmed to grieve most intensely for those with what is called the highest reproductive value, that is, those who would have been the most able to reproduce our genes; that we would grieve more for kin than for non-kin, and more for the young than for the old; and that those parents least able to reproduce their lost child would grieve more, that is, older parents would grieve more than younger ones. The trouble with this kind of hypothesis-testing is that, for one reason or another, there are always exceptions to the rule.

This has to be the longest and most comprehensive study on grief ever written, but despite its length, I had no difficulty reading it from cover to cover, and I learned a lot about a lot of things along the way. It is a mine of information, and there are 40 pages of up-to-date references. I did sometimes wonder why it was necessary to examine such a simple phenomenon in such meticulous detail. This should remain the definitive text on the subject for some years to come, which I imagine was Archer's intention.